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Do I need to smoke?
Ellopos: Why do we smoke, really?
Introducing Allen Carr's, My experience of smoking
Page 5
If life is more complete with a smoke and empty without it, then a person needs to smoke all the time! This is just horrible, as you can imagine and as all smokers know. Chain smoking is the ideal condition for a smoker, whether a smoker can afford it (in terms of money and health), or not. This is the glorious end!, the high purpose, to replace air with dirt by a never ending cigarette, and lead yourself to suffocation.
Of course, the nicotine-monster that craves for the next cigarette, is not the whole of us. A person can be addicted to nicotine and yet keep, e.g. as a soldier his fighting abilities, as a writer the relevant virtues, etc., as long as his health condition is not critical. The purists who attack smoking sometimes give the impression that a smoker is a person of no worth at all.
A smoker can be even a better person, because love of health is not an ideal. A man needs health in order to do something with it. Health is not a good in itself. Even freedom in the sense of independence is not a good in itself. I need to be free for some reason, to do something with my freedom. This is how we encounter another ‘benefit’ and ‘reason’ of smoking.
Cf. Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet | Plato, Whom are we talking to? | Kierkegaard, My work as an author | Emerson, Self-knowledge | Gibson - McRury, Discovering one's face | Emerson, We differ in art, not in wisdom | Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
